§7.1 I HAVE DESCRIBED HOW SOLUTIONS to the general cubic and quartic equations were found by Italian mathematicians in the first half of the 16th century. The next obvious challenge was the general ...

Western civilization woke with a start after the slumbers of the medieval age. Universities in Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Paris and elsewhere began to flourish. In the early 16th century, several ...

Given any cubic or quartic equation with real coefficients, it can be transformed by a change of variable into a standard form, and thus solved by means of a double-sided scale (Fig. 1) in the case of ...